Re: Extranets need a stack too
- From: spconsultant <gfpilot2002@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:46:50 -0700 (PDT)
Try rebooting?
On Sep 9, 11:41 am, astillw...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Everything in our well-ordered IT world has a stack. The one I had to
memorize for a networked computing class in college was the renown TCP/
IP stack.
But extranets don’t really have a stack yet. They should, because they
should connect with the real world of legal contracts. Contracts are
the means by which businesses hold each other accountable. And they
work great because there are few things more respected by the law.
But we seldom use them in IT (except with our vendors). Imagine what
would happen if email relationships had a contract: no spam from you
or else. Of course, we don’t control who can send us email (what were
we thinking when we dreamt that up).
But extranets need a stack and that stack should start at the bottom
with a contract, above that we should have a trust protocol that
allows us to setup secure communications, above that would be a way to
manage the relationships with people we trust, and above that, we
should have service software that allows us manage information sharing
with our partners, prospects, customers, etc…
And what should be in that contract? It should outline our
expectations of how we manage our identities, how we manage our
compliance with respect to the information we might share (and yes, we
should separate the act of sharing with the act of intending to
share), and it might also contain clauses about document retention and
other things related to how we can use each other’s information (or
not use it, as the case might be). Additionally, it’ll probably have
legal words like force majuere and herewith (hey, lawyers have their
jargon too, just like IT).
As to the trust protocol, well, that might be nothing more than a
traceable pair of fedex pouches that contain CD’s with public keys
that pass in the night. (you send me yours, and I send you mine).
Then it would be handy to be able to set-up a traceable partnership
with an outside party.
Then, I should be able to allow my business users to create actual
sharing instances with actual people inside of the partner
organization. I want my business users to do this, because they know
who they need to share with, and because I want to hold them
responsible for the sharings they make. They do too much email with
attachments, when there could be easier, more traceable means of
sharing. IT should be making sure the contract, the trust, and the
partnership is in place. But the actual access, well the business
users should manage that. IT doesn’t have the time or the knowledge.
Besides, I need a way to track all this, to enable the act of “holding
the business users” responsible, so I need a way to watch them. And
that should be part of our stack: distributed responsibility for
sharing, but centralized oversight for tracking and auditing for
compliance.
And all of this is a lot more than just setting up Forms-Based
Authentication on a Sharepoint farm, or even more than leveraging the
Extranet Collaboration Toolkit from Microsoft. Epok has thought hard
about a lot of this, and the long term answer lies in devising ways to
do a lot more federation between businesses in a much quicker fashion
than many federation protocols and products currently allow.
http://research.epokinc.com/blog/
.
- References:
- Extranets need a stack too
- From: astillwell
- Extranets need a stack too
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